for Heju. I feel bad that I didn’t. Unfortunately, this profound clarifying moment of self-awareness hadn’t yet occurred, and I was, at the time, angry about what I considered her childish behaviour.
I went out for a walk. It was nearly eleven o’clock and a light rain was falling. I strolled along the virtually deserted sidewalk, and passed a solitary elderly man pushing a large antique wood cart loaded with trash bags that he had been picking up from in front of the local shops and restaurants. Ironic, I thought. Korean multinational high-tech companies like Samsung produce silicon computer chips the size of a pinhead; yet here was someone collecting garbage using the same methods employed in medieval agrarian societies.
Chapter 4
Heju and I were fine in the morning. We didn’t stay mad at each other long. She did, however, continue to sporadically upbraid me in the weeks after, accusing me unflatteringly of being a slave driver and a drill sergeant, and continuing to insinuate that this wasn’t a trip, but a boot camp.
In decidedly un-boot-camp style, we began our fourth day on Ganghwa by treating the exceptionally kind Yun-ja, the Ganghwa tourism employee — who had been phoning us regularly to ask if there was anything she could assist us with — to lunch at a little restaurant in town.
Seated at the table, Yun-ja remarked admiringly, “You’ve stayed on Ganghwa for four days. Most Koreans just visit for one day then leave.”
“But there’s so much to see here,” I said, which was the honest-to-goodness truth.
After lunch, Heju and I drove along the town’s main road, and, on a whim, stopped in front of the utilitarian Incheon Ganghwa Police Station. I wanted to ask about a tragic drowning of four young students that I had read about, which happened on the island.
Behind the station desk were two officers, Jang Bu-gun and Choi Kyung-ju. They recalled the sad event. “They were on a church outing to Dongmak Beach on the south shore catching shellfish out on the mudflats. The tide comes in very fast there. The water’s very dangerous. No one’s allowed to swim there. The girls panicked and got stuck in the mud. After the tide went out, people found their bodies. Locals don’t go out to where the girls went. They use boards to catch shellfish on the mudflats.”
I had seen on a TV program about how Korean coastal villagers collecting shellfish in particularly deep and soft mud flats must lean their weight on a boogie-board-size plank they thrust in front of them so as not to sink down into the muck. When Heju and I had been out on the tidal mud flats along the west coast in the city of Gunsan, in North Jeolla Province, I had sunk up to my shins in the soft goo, and it took me ten minutes to pry my legs out of the vacuum seal. Heju had thought it was hilarious.
“How do you get out of the mud if you’re stuck?” I asked the officers.
“If you panic, your legs sink deeper,” one said. “If you try to stand straight, it’s easy to sink. Lie down, and when the tide comes in, let the water float you out.”
Easier said than done, I thought.
After fifteen minutes, an officer entered the station accompanied by two gentlemen: a slight man and a much larger fellow, both with grim countenances. The smaller one as it turned out was a taxi driver, and the other had been his passenger the night before. They had been involved in a bit of a punch-up.
“They’re here to work it out,” the officer informed us, though they didn’t appear overly conciliatory to each other. “The drinking culture’s widespread here,” he added. “When people get drunk, they become very emotional. It’s easy to get in a fight.” Drunken fights, minor thefts, and traffic accidents were the three most common issues on the island, he said.
Before fists started flying again we took our leave and drove up the quiet adjacent back street. In an unassuming little residential area we came to Goryeogungji (Goryeo Palace Site). Goryeo was the royal dynasty that ruled from 918 to 1392. The original Goryeo Palace was constructed somewhere near here in 1232 as a refuge for the royal court to rule from during the Mongol siege of Korea. That palace, though, was totally destroyed by the Mongols in 1259.
In 1636, the royal family again moved to the grounds, this time to escape the Manchu invasion. Several buildings were erected to accommodate them. But the next year, the Manchus captured Ganghwa town and took temporary occupancy of the palace. Since then, the buildings remained basically unused by the royal family and were later converted for government use.
In 1782, a royal library, Oegyujanggak, which roughly translates as “The Outside Building for Writings by Important People,” was constructed on the site where we now stood. This structure held a surfeit of official royal Joseon books referred to as Uigwe (Royal Protocols). Uigwe recorded the annals of Joseon history, with hand-drawn illustrations of royal weddings and funerals, the construction and repair of palaces, court performances, costumes, musical instruments, and decoration. The approximately four thousand Uigwe volumes were stored at Changdeok Palace library in Seoul. In 1782, close to three hundred volumes were transferred to the Ganghwa library for safekeeping.
The French navy invaded Ganghwa in October 1866 to mete out punitive measures in response to the executions of French priests in Seoul the same year. The French set fire to the fort walls surrounding Ganghwa town as well as to the Goryeo Palace government buildings, including Oegyujanggak, burning them to the ground. The French reportedly carted off flags, cannons, eight thousand muskets, twenty-three boxes of silver ingots and several of gold, as well as lacquer ware, jade, and paintings in addition to the 297 Uigwe volumes. They stored the latter at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The collection was largely forgotten until a Korean discovered it in 1975. Then, after decades of negotiations between the two countries, in 2010, presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Lee Myung-bak signed an agreement that saw all the books returned to Korea between April and June the following year.
Goryeo Palace really has no connection to the actual Goryeo period, except for being on or near the same grounds where the large former palace once sat. Of the original palace, only a few foundation stones remain, and they are adjacent to this location. What was before us had been constructed much more recently, in 1977. A modest stone wall enclosing the interior, and a traditional but small front gate — two heavy vertical wood columns supporting a heavy arched tiled roof. We entered to find a small field of grass, and I was delighted, because grass is a rare sight in Korea. Almost every viable acre across the peninsula was long ago converted into agricultural farmland, and finding a natural grass meadow can be like spotting a rare bird.
Off to the side were several one-storey government buildings that had been rebuilt in 1977. The new incarnation of the library, Oegyujanggok, was erected in 2002. The wood comprising the low, modest buildings was so dry, its paint so worn and faded, their appearances and feel could have passed for hundreds of years old. One building was L-shaped, built on a foundation of several layers of flat cut granite, the black, shale-tiled arched roof extending far over the front walls. In front, a row of square wooden beams supported the roof, creating a protected porch underneath. The walls appeared to have a series of shutter-like doors painted green, though this colour, too, was badly faded. The courtyard was of dry earth.
Our guidebook said that Yongheun Palace (Palace of the Rising Dragon) was just a little way along the street. The name was misleading. It wasn’t a palace either, but rather, a compound with a traditional home that had been renamed a “palace” to honour a Ganghwa lad who had grown up in it in the 1830s. The young man had been crowned King Cheoljong at the age of nineteen in 1849, after the heirless reigning king died. Cheoljong was a distant relative of a past king, and he was chosen to reign as the twenty-fifth monarch, more because he could be easily manipulated by a power-hungry court faction than for his sense of acumen.
Cheoljong’s
